Telstra outages highlight need for NBN: Stephen Conroy

By Nichola Spain

The communication minister Stephen Conroy says severe communication outages highlight the need for a National Broadband Network (NBN). He says the Warrnambool Telstra exchange fire caused one of the rarest telecommunications events in history.

It's been nine days since thousands of customers across south-west Victoria lost access to internet, landline and mobile services.

The response from the Federal Government has been slow but welcomed by the community.

Senator Conroy said this was one of the rarest events for the telecommunications sector in more than 30 years.

"Its impact has been quite devastating on the regional communities; the whole infrastructure of a modern society is based around this telecommunications network," he said.

"It's appropriate that we conduct an inquiry, we want to get to the bottom of what's happened, we want to understand what we need to do to ensure that we can protect the network."

While the minister concedes the State Government is not responsible for the matter, he took the opportunity to have a go at Premier Ted Baillieu.

"Ted Baillieu is missing in action on most things, but on this one I would say to you, that this is a Telstra issue. They're working hard to fix it."

The fire at the Warrnambool Telephone Exchange on Thursday last week has put further pressure on the Federal Government to ramp up its delivery of the NBN, but the senator said it's more important to get the south-west reconnected with existing infrastructure.

He said the NBN is designed with emergency redundancies to have the capacity to handle similar events if they occur in the future.

"The NBN is being built on the basis it's got to be able to have redundancies to handle emergency situations, and that is a core part of a National Broadband Network's build."

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy will visit Warrnambool and other affected areas in the next two weeks to gauge the needs and concerns of communities.

The final report can be expected by early 2013.

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy spoke with Prue Bentley on ABC Ballarat and South West Victoria Mornings program.